Equality: In the Year 2000

Chapter Fourteen The Year 2, New Calendar

Julian had planned to spend a few hours at his studies before going over to the Leetes’, but it didn’t work out that way.

He had hardly finished his toilet and breakfast and sat down at his desk, when the phone screen buzzed.

He activated it and was confronted with the youthful, open face of Sean O’Callahan.

“Good morning, Mr. West. I hope I’m not bothering you.”

“Make it Julian. No, of course not. What can I do for you, Sean?”

He grinned. “Well, as a matter of fact, I have somewhat of a surprise for you. Can you come over to my place? I’m in Building Two, sixteenth floor, apartment sixteen-B.”

“A surprise?” Julian echoed—surprised.

“That’s right.”

He said, “All right, I’ll be right over.”

“Fine.” The other’s face faded from the screen.

Julian stood up and made his way toward the door. He couldn’t think of any particular reason to notify the Leetes of his little expedition into the outside world. In fact, unless he was mistaken, this was one of Edith’s work days and hadn’t Mrs. Leete said something about attending a meeting?

He took the elevator down to the metro level, and looked around. Always before when he had ventured out, one or more of the Leetes had been along, so he hadn’t had to figure out the transport system.

He asked the first passerby in halting Interlingua how to get to Building Two, which he assumed to be one of the other high-rise apartment buildings in the university city. The directions were simplicity itself, and he took the next car heading for his destination.

He’d hardly had time to seat himself before they were at a new station whose sign read BUILDING TWO. He got out and made his way over to the elevator banks. From time to time people passing would smile at him in friendly fashion, and twice people nodded and said, “Mr. West,” by way of greeting. Although he knew none of them, evidently his face was recognized widely. So, he was rapidly becoming a minor celebrity in spite of Dr. Leete’s attempts to shield him in these early weeks of his arrival from the past.

He said, “Sixteenth Floor,” into the elevator’s screen and the robotlike voice answered, “Yes, Mr. West.” He wondered vaguely what would happen if he went out to some place on the Pacific coast: would the elevator screens recognize him there? Were the data banks and the face of every resident of United America tied in with every screen in the country? The magnitude of it all rather boggled his mind.

There were signs on the wall on the sixteenth floor, giving directions. He had no difficultly finding Sean O’Callahan’s apartment. He pressed the button, standing before the identity screen.

The door opened, and he was greeted by a beaming Sean.

“Come in and meet your surprise.”

Frowning in puzzlement, Julian followed his host into the living room. Four men were seated there, including William Harrison and Frederic Ley. The other two were strangers: a young man of possibly thirty, tall, intelligent-looking, with a somewhat quizzical expression; the other must have been somewhere in his early seventies, slightly heavy, gray hair and mustache, slightly florid face.

The latter said in a slow voice, “Hello, Jule. It’s been a long time.”

Julian stared at him, shot a puzzled look at the grinning Sean, then gazed back at the elderly man.

“You look exactly like you did the last time we saw each other in the Knickerbocker-Links Club in New York. I’m afraid you can’t say the same about me.”

“I’ll be damned!” Julian exclaimed. “Bert Melville!”

“That’s right, Jule. I thought you were committing suicide when you let that crackpot Doctor Pillsbury put you into hibernation; evidently he wasn’t as big a crackpot as everybody thought. Here you are, looking about thirty-five. Here I am looking seventy-three and feeling every year of it. I should have let him put me under too.”

“To wake up in a world like this?” Harrison said bitterly.

Sean led Julian over to the younger man, who stood at their approach. “This is Dave Woolman,” he said, “who has one of the most fascinating jobs in the country.”

Dave had a very sincere, unhumorous smile, and shook hands strongly. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. Somebody out of the past. Somebody who knew the real world.”

Julian didn’t quite get that. He said, “Nice to meet you. What’s the most fascinating job in the country?”

“Sit down. Sit down, everybody,” said Sean. When they were seated, he explained, “Possibly not for Dave. It’s probably just tedious routine for him, but he’s in charge of the Radio Astronomy Observatory on Luna.”

Julian shook his head. “What’s radio astronomy? Astronomy is a field on which I was completely blank even in the 1960s. You can imagine to what extent I’m ignorant now, after a third of a century of progress. Did you say Luna? You mean there’s an observatory on the moon?”

Dave Woolman nodded. “It was decided as far back as 1960 that the radio telescope, rather than the spaceship, would probably be the first instrument to establish contact with intelligent life beyond the solar system. Since your time, we have receivers of such sensitivity and antennas of such enormous size, that we are optimistic about sending and picking up radio signals from the nearer stars. The search for these signals began in 1960 at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank, West Virginia. The Luna Observatory is a great advantage. It’s located on the far side, and hence cut off from a great deal of the local radio interference that an earth-bound observatory suffers.”

“I’m impressed,” Julian said. “Have you been able to pick up any messages from other worlds?”

A strange silence fell over the whole group.

Woolman said finally, “I am afraid I’m not in a position to answer that.”

The elderly Bert Melville changed the subject. He had been looking at Julian intently, and now he turned to Harrison and said, “You know, Jule and I used to belong to a consorium based in New York, the Bahamas, and Switzerland. We used to swing some pretty big deals.” His laugh quavered a bit. “Those were the days, eh, Jule? Remember the time we squeezed out Bob Percy and took over Diversified?”

“Yes. Yes, I remember that operation. Bob shot himself afterwards.”

“I’d forgotten about that part of it,” Melville said.

Harrison seemed slightly impatient. He said to Julian, “Did you think over what we were discussing the other day—in short, Utopias?”

“Yes, yes I did. Frankly, I didn’t come up with much in the way of a conclusion.”

Harrison nodded. “I was just giving you some preliminaries to work on, Mr. West. Are you acquainted with the work of a contemporary of yours, the British writer Arthur C. Clarke?”

Julian frowned a little. “It seems to me that the Leetes have mentioned him a couple of times, as a popularizer of science.”

“Yes.” Harrison got to his feet and went over to the library booster, which sat on the desk. He dialed as he said over his shoulder, “This is from one of his books. Astonishingly prophetic. I’ll read you just this one passage.

“’Civilization cannot exist without new frontiers; it needs them both physically and spiritually. The physical need is obvious—new lands, new resources, new materials. The spiritual need is less apparent, but in the long run it is more important. We do not live by bread alone; we need adventure, variety, novelty, romance. As the psychologists have shown by their sensory deprivation experiments, a man goes swiftly mad if he is isolated in a silent, darkened room, cut off completely from the external world. What is true of individuals is also true of societies; they too can become insane without sufficient stimulus.’”

Harrison deactivated the screen and turned back to Julian. “What’s your reaction to that?”

“I don’t know.” Julian shifted in his chair. “It makes a lot of sense.”

The seventy-three-year-old Bert Melville leaned forward impatiently. “Jule, the damn country is turning to mush. Ninety-eight percent do nothing but putter around with their hobbies: they paint paintings nobody wants to look at; they write books nobody reads; they move into mobile towns and travel around the country doing nothing but trying to enjoy themselves.”

Harrison took it up with his usual energy. “Ethically, the country is going to pot. Institutions that have come down to us through the ages are being completely eroded. Look at sex. All the young people now behave like rabbits. They start educating them on how to screw in God only knows how many different positions as soon as they’re into their teens. The family is disappearing, and the population is beginning to decrease. Whatever happened to religious training? The churches are empty except for old folks—those churches that remain at all.”

The usually taciturn Ley put in his word. “It’s like Mr. Melville said. ‘The country’s turning to mush.’ They don’t even have boxing any more. ‘Somebody might get hurt.’ Hell, when I was a kid Joe Louis was still alive. Fought his way up out of the slums, thrilled millions, and made millions. What’s wrong with that? Give the kids a desire to make something of themselves, to fight their way up. I read about this Manolete, the bullfighter in Spain. Another slum kid, but with guts. Became the best bullfighter of all time. Made tons of bucks thrilling people, taking his chances. Inspired other poor Spanish kids to make their play for the big time. How about car racing? I was at Indianapolis one year, at the Old Brickyard. Talk about thrills. The crowd was on its feet half the time, yelling themselves crazy. Those guys that drove those cars had guts, and they inspired younger people to get in there and fight.”

“All the old virtues are topsy-turvy,” Sean muttered. “For instance, anybody at all can dial as much pornography as he wants from the International Data Banks. You should see some of it. A six-year-old kid can look at it if he wants.”

Julian was looking thoughtful. “I’ve argued some of this with Academician Leete and his family. What he points out is that with this new system of the International Data Banks, it’s the best people, those with the highest Aptitude Quotient, who wind up running the country. The rest aren’t needed.”

“Ah?” Harrison said triumphantly. “Who says they’re the best? A bunch of machines! There are some things, Mr. West, a machine can’t measure.”

“The whole idea rather turned me off at the beginning,” Julian admitted. “But Academician Leete has some strong arguments and I don’t have much material to base my disagreements on. Whom can’t the computers measure?”

Harrison, in his enthusiasm, was on his feet. “Whom can’t they measure? The men who count most. The men who have counted most down through the centuries. Men with the dream, with the urge for power, with ruthless ambition, men of aggression, of charisma. The men whose ambition is such that the whole world is pushed forward as a result of their efforts.”

“Such as whom?” Julian said, his voice skeptical.

Harrison nodded at the validity of the question. “Do you know that Alexander the Great was the despair of his tutors, that Winston Churchill was a third-rater in school, that Ulysses S. Grant graduated twenty-first in a class of thirty-nine at West Point? Hitler was a high school dropout and failed his entrance examination to the art academy. Charlemagne couldn’t read or write. Caesar wrote Latin inadequately, much to the embarrassment of Latin teachers to this day. Lord Nelson received only a summary education and at the age of twelve went to sea as a midshipman. Lincoln had less than a year’s schooling. Washington had little formal learning; his biographer says, ‘His chief education was received from practical men and outdoor occupations, not from books.’ Thomas Edison had exactly three months of education and at the age of twelve became a newsboy on the railroads. Dickens had a vocabulary of twenty-five hundred words, and Shakespeare was spurned by most of the literati of his day because he never went to university.

“I could go on and on. Tell me, Mr. West, do you imagine for a moment that any of these men would be selected at Muster Day for even the meanest of positions in the present so-called Republic of the Golden Rule?”

The other men laughed scornfully.

Julian said slowly, “No. From what 1 understand about the computers and the Aptitude Quotient, I suppose none of them would be selected.” He thought a moment. “I suppose the same thing applies to women. No reason why not.”

Dave Woolman said, “Catherine the Great of Russia, one of the most famous women of all time, couldn’t sign her name until she became Empress when she was past the age of forty.”

Julian was listening intently.

Bert Melville spoke now. “Look at yourself, Jule. One of the most successful young men I’ve ever met. You doubled the fortune your father left you before you were thirty. In the Asian war, you went in as a shavetail lieutenant, though God knows you could have pulled strings in Washington. But you came out a major with a fist full of medals. When you found out you were a sick man you had the guts to undertake a dangerous experiment. Not one person in a thousand at the time thought you’d come through.”

“What will happen to you under this society, Mr. West?” Harrison urged.

Julian slumped in his seat. “After I’ve learned the language and studied up a bit, I’ll leave Leete’s tutelage and be off on my own. My Aptitude Quotient will obviously not be such that I will be selected on Muster Day for a job—any job. One of the Leetes suggested that I might give some talks to the younger people, explaining day by day life in the old times before I went into stasis.”

The aged Bert Melville snorted in deprecation. “Not much of a life for a man of your guts and ambition, Jule.”

Julian growled at him, “So, what’s the alternative? The fact of the matter is I understand that the man in the street likes what he’s getting. He’s secure, living the life of Riley. Here we are, five men sitting around beefing that the race has lost its dynamite, that wishy-washy people without the dream but with the ability to run up high Aptitude Quotients are at the country’s helm. What can five men do?”

Once again there was silence, and once again it was Harrison who finally spoke up. “There are more of us than five, Julian.”

“You mean you’ve got an organization?”

“Yes, of course. Nationally. And potentially a much larger one.”

“Recruited from where, and from what elements?”

Bert Melville grunted at that. “There were a few billionaires and several thousand millionaires when this change took place, Jule; they and their families. There were also hundreds of thousands of Americans who felt they were on their way up, men and women on the make, as we used to call it; all these and their families.”

“You can’t figure on all of them.”

“No, of course not. But wouldn’t you have fought the change, had you been awake at the time it took place?”

“Undoubtedly,” Julian answered. “Who else?”

Sean O’Callahan said, “There were a few thousand military, general and admiral rank, when the phasing out of the army, navy, and air corps took place. Not to mention tens of thousands of majors, lieutenant-colonels, and their equivalent ranks in navy and air force. Anybody who selects the military as his career sees it as a lifetime job. Practically none of these people were selected by the computers for positions in the new society.”

“Who else?”

“There were other fields that almost completely disappeared,” Dave Woolman said seriously. “The professionally religious, for instance. Priests, nuns, ministers, rabbis, preachers, evangelists, missionaries. A large number of them were in despair when they saw religion withering away.”

“I can imagine,” Julian said. “Who else doesn’t like the present way?”

Harrison said somewhat impatiently, “Can’t you see how many people there must be who can’t adapt to this fast-changing world? Conservatives: those who liked the old ways; those who dragged their feet at the changes that applied to almost every aspect of our way of life. Suppose you were a mediumly successful farmer in Mississippi or Idaho. Your grandfather had settled your land, your father had improved it, you were born and raised on it. One day the representatives of the Republic of the Golden Rule come along and tell you that your method of farming is out—antiquated or whatever. That all farmland is being amalgamated so that it can be turned over to the latest automated farm machinery, operated largely by computers. How would you feel?”

Sean said, “All these are potential followers of ours when the break comes.”

Julian eyed him. “What break?” Those they had mentioned coincided with the malcontents Edith and her father had named.

Harrison said, his voice smooth, “We can hardly tell you that, Julian, until we know that you’re completely with us.”

“I see. Of what use could I be to you? I’m out of my depth in this world. I don’t know the ropes. I can’t even speak the language very well as yet.”

Sean said, “Jule, you’re the type we don’t have much of any more. You’re a combat man, an aggressive, ambitious, tough fighter.”

“I’ve seen combat,” Fredric Ley grumbled.

Sean looked at him. “Over a third of a century ago. Jule was in combat, killing men, winning medals, a few months ago.” He turned back to Julian. “We need your type. You’re the leader material we need so badly. You don’t have to know how to program a computer, or pilot a spaceship. We can locate lots of people to do that.”

“I see. Well, what happens now?”

Harrison said, “We don’t expect an immediate decision, Julian. Think about it and let us know. You can always get in touch with the organization through Sean, here.”

Julian stood up. “All right, I’ll think it over. Good morning, gentlemen.” He looked at Bert Melville. “A real surprise to see you again, Bert.”

“Oh, we’ll see a good deal of each other in the future, Jule. Talk over the old days, when men were men.” He blinked watery eyes in anticipation.

Sean saw Julian to the door and gave him a pat on the shoulder as he left.

Julian walked down the corridors to the elevators.

Fredric Ley packed a gun in a shoulder holster under his left arm. Supposedly it was in a hideaway rig, but Julian West had seen too many guns in his day to be fooled. There had even been times when his financial activities were such that he had retained a bodyguard, armed in much the same manner as was Ley.